Exhibition archive

Duration: 19 January 2023 - 01 September 2023 Can things recount their own biographies? The exhibition looks at the concept of the object biography, reconstructing its origins, and asks what the life of a thing might be and how we might conceive our perceptions of things – their biographies.

Duration: 19 May - 31 October (extended until 02 January 2023) Order is a fundamental aspect of every museum: the ordering of things, the ordering of knowledge about humanity and the world. Our next exhibition takes a closer look at precisely these systems. Taking a closer look at these ordering devices can help us detect unconscious assumptions and blind spots, especially in museum work.

Click through some examples of our crisis collection in the gallery.

Duration: 23 September 2021 – 14 March 2021 A special exhibition of the Museum Utopie und Alltag, Eisenhüttenstadt in cooperation with the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge

Duration: 25 March 2021 – 30 August 2021 The exhibition puts a spotlight on the dawn of industrial design in the GDR and in particular on the work of the Dutch architect and Bauhaus member Mart Stam for a consistent modernisation of the product world and the institutional promotion of a new industrial culture.

Duration: 25 March 2021 - 31 December 2021 On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Braun company, the exhibition outlines the most important aspects and strategies of the Braun idea, the first comprehensive corporate identity (CI) of a German company

First Part of the Exhibition Series "111/99. Questioning the Modernist Design Vocabulary"

Even before Freud, people were attributing erotic qualities to things. The exhibition traces the material and immaterial production of eroticism. Shape and color, purpose and use, implicit allusions and explicit renderings all make things the stuff of erotic fantasies, while also making them eloquent documents for a cultural history of sexuality.

Extended until April 9! Private and Anonymous Photography from the Collection of Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge.

Thursday, 27. July 2017 to Monday, 2. October 2017 Cabinet of the Unknown is a project that pursues the goal to connect the known to the unknown. Taking its title as a cue from Cabinet d’Ignorance of Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden, Cabinet of the Unknown invites its collaborators from Oranienstr. to work on objects that cannot be taxonomified and defined at Museum der Dinge. The objects and the discussions discovered and remained undiscovered will compose the exhibition that will take place in July–September 2017.

Duration: February 10 - June 26, 2017 Berlin after 1945: "How will we live?" was the question of the hour. The exhibition project 'gern modern?' explores ideas for actual and idealized concepts of home that were developed by German Werkbund members in the war-ravaged city and asks about the issue's timeliness and significance for the present.

Today, knowledge about materials, their origins and processing is valued and desired more than ever before. At the same time, such knowledge is specialized, concealed and the domain of experts. How can it become available to everyone?

Thursday, 17. March 2016 to Monday, 29. August 2016

What do children and teenagers collect? How do you make a personal curio cabinet into a publicly perceived collection?

Globes, fire extinguishers, drills, cooker hoods, fur coats, roast chickens, rugs, television sets, circles, stripes, lines and colours: The Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge presents a cosmos of pictures of day-to-day life with over 450 graphic advertisements from its collection of documents of everyday culture.

Five young men – refugees from West African countries – produce high quality design objects in a Kreuzberg design manufacture: they are committed to build a basis for their future.

On the eve of the First World War, the industrial design association Deutscher Werkbund, founded by artists and industrialists in 1907, launched a mobilization of things: the functional, standardized and materially sensible design of everyday products would make the label "Made in Germany", required by British import law, rise above its original status as a mark of ostensibly poor quality. On the contrary, "Made in Germany" would be transformed into a seal of quality, raising the export power of the German Empire.

A machine could be more than just a technical box, as shown now in the exhibition called “Standby” in the Museum of Things in Kreuzberg. The Institut for Formforschung, a cooperation of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences / Department of Design and the Museum of Things, takes a closer look at machines in our daily lives.

Recycling, re-use, longer use, material recovery, conversion to new purposes: the use of household and industrial waste in product design often creates not only new resources in the economic sense, but also new values in the ideal and personal sphere.

Author’s cabinet Koray Ozgen (with Fuat Ozgen’s tea glass collection) Fuat Ozgen collects objects and ephemera. A conversation with his designer brother Koray Ozgen initiated his passion for slim waisted (ince belli) tea glasses. In the following years this led to a considerable collection of these vessels mostly used in Anatolia since early 20th Century.

Since 2007 the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge’s “open depot” standing exhibition has been pushing new levels of debate on the topic of collection in the public sphere. In the new exhibition series, “Collections Show…” we turn our attention to privately curated collections, comparing and contrasting their particular focuses and methods of organization.

Whether we are spending it, saving it or wasting it, time seems to take on a thing-like character in many of our mental and verbal constructs about it. Such expressions reveal not only a widespread understanding of time as material, but an implicit commodification of the spaces between lived events.

Matias Bechtold places a focus in his artistic works on the special traits of technical casings by reinterpreting the interior of a device as living space. Where a normal user may view the interior of a device as determined by the function of the device itself, Matias Bechtold presents the extracted section as a different world.

çokçok is a Turkish expression that means "an insatiable hunger for more". The exhibition ISTANBUL ALPHABET – from çokçok to zikzak partakes of the special quality of the Museum der Dinge: the exploration of the culture of everyday objects.

"Museumsbauhütte" is a pragmatic and epistemological workshop, where scientific, artistic and technological knowledge is being integrated.

In the guest project WOW students of design at the Fachhochschule Potsdam present the results of their detailed research about the subject of "blinding". They try to visualise the different "blinding qualities" and show various aspects of product culture: things that were primarily created to impress others, to show off or to deceive.

The Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge exhibits the estate of the Bauhaus disciple and Werkbund adherent Herbert Hirche. The exhibition focuses on the specific situation of post-war Germany, in which an ethics of things was proposed as a contribution to material and intellectual reconstruction.

The exhibition "Evil things – an encyclopedia of bad taste" uses a one hundred year-old system to categorise violations of taste, where things are not just submitted to a judgement of taste, but also to ethical valuation of their production, construction and appearance.

This exhibition is dedicated to artistic museum projects, which reflect the museum in a critical, ironic, pensive or joyful way.

Detour is a travelling group show featuring the Moleskine notebooks designed by internationally recognized artists, architects, film directors, graphic designers, illustrators and writers.

Apart from the permanent collection the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge shows a new installation focusing on furniture as a museum object beyond the usual attribution to a designer or a stylistic context. This new presentation questions the relationship between movables and space.

The Werkbund Archive – Museum of Things takes the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of the German Werkbund (German Work Federation) to throw a critical eye on the history of the development and reception of this reform movement, and to review the objectives of the Werkbund with regard to their future usefulness in the light of current product culture.